The murder trial of celebrated San Francisco filmmaker and journalist Kevin Epps took a dramatic turn this week when defense counsel moved for a mistrial midway through the prosecution’s closing argument, accusing Assistant District Attorney Jonathan Schmidt of prosecutorial misconduct. The allegation is not only serious — it is uncanny. Schmidt is the very same prosecutor whose conduct once helped establish Ninth Circuit precedent on this exact form of misconduct.
In United States v. Blueford (2002), the Ninth Circuit held that a prosecutor violates a defendant’s constitutional right to a fair trial when he urges jurors to draw inferences he knows are false — or has strong reason to doubt — especially when the government itself possesses evidence directly contradicting the inference. In that case, the prosecutor was rebuked for precisely such behavior. The prosecutor’s name: Jonathan Schmidt, currently prosecuting the People of the State of California v. Kevin Epps.
That is not mere irony. It is an indictment of the justice system in San Francisco.
A prosecutor’s duty is not to win — it’s to seek justice
The Ninth Circuit in Blueford reminded us why prosecutorial misconduct strikes at the heart of due process. A prosecutor “is a representative not of an ordinary party, but of a sovereignty whose obligation to govern impartially is as compelling as its obligation to govern at all. His interest … is not that he shall win a case, but that justice shall be done.” A prosecutor may argue reasonable inferences from the evidence, but he may not urge the jury to believe something he knows — or has strong reason to believe — is false, particularly when the government declines to correct the record…